What is this storyboard about?
Bring Me The Horizon
The metalband Bring Me The Horizon released their sixth album amo on the 25th of January 2019. The reaction on the new album is divided. The sound of this album is totally different than fans are used to hearing from them. It feels like they are stepping out of their ‘heavy metal’ fase and into a new one. Besides that, it is said that the album is not cohesive because of the many styles of music being incorporated. One song called ‘heavy metal’ of their new album talks about their change in genre and the reaction of their fans:
“And I keep picking petals I’m afraid you don’t love me anymore ’Cause a kid on the ’gram in a Black Dahlia tank Says it ain’t heavy metal”
Research Question
So, is the new albuma actually significantly different than the older ones? If yes, what is so different about it? Which genre could be applied to the new album instead of Heavy Metal? My research question is therefore: Is Bring Me The Horizon creating a new musical image and what is this image exactly?
Method
To anwer my research question I’m using a handfull of different Spofity playlists to compare their features. My main corpus is obviously BMTH’s newest album amo. Besides that I’m also looking into all their old albums: Count Your Blessings, Suidice Season, There is a Hell Believe Me I’ve Seen it. There is a Heaven Let’s Keep it a Secret, Sempiternal and That’s the Spirit. To get the Spotify features for the albums, I’ve make seperate playlist for each. With the help of these albums I can compare the new album to the old ones and see what the differences and similarities are.
This will hopefully answer the first part of my research question, but more is needed to answer the second. Different musical genres can help me with that. I’m going to use different Spotify playlists to compare them to the albums and see which genre fits the best per album for the newest album. The playlists I’m using for this are: Heavy Metal, Pop Internacional, Pure Pop Punk, Rock Classics and Ultimate Indie.
By combining these two elements, the BMTH albums and different genre playlist, I hope to answer my research question. For more information about the albums and the playlists being used: see the Appendix.
Is Bring Me The Horizon’s newest album really that different from the others?
What Do The Spotify Features Tell Us?
In this graph, the Spotify features valence and energy are plotted against eachother for all the albums Bring Me The Horizon has made and the loudness of the songs is shown by the size of the dots. Valence and energy are measured on a scale from 0 to 1. Valence shows how positive a track is, so with a score of 0 a track is really negative and a really positivie track will score 1. The general distribution for valence is fairly average, most tracks score between 0.4 and 0.6. The intensity and activity of a track is shown by the energy feature. Spotify says that energetic tracks, so tracks that score high on the scale, are fast, loud and noisy like death metal. When looking at the distribution for this feature, most tracks have a score of 0.8. Loudness has a different scale than the other features. It is measured in decibles (dB) and typically ranges from -60 to 0 dB. In general, the loudness of a track is measured between -10 and -5 on average.
Spofity Features and Bring Me The Horizon
As can be seen in the graph on the left, BMTH’s music mostly scores below 0.5 on valence and in general scores really high on energy. An interesting find in this graph is the shift in valence between the first and last few albums. The first album Count your blessings scores low on valence, like most of the BMTH songs in general. But looking at the last two albums That’s the Spirit and amo, it can be seen that those songs score the highest on valence. Therefore it can be said that the outliers on the valence scale for all BMTH songs, are actually the songs of these last two albums. When looking at the energy scale, there are three main outliers: a song called ‘Memorial’ from There is a Hell…, ‘i apologise if you feel something’ from amo and ‘Fifteen Fantoms, Counting’ from Count your Blessings. ‘Memorial’ and ‘Fifteen Fantoms, Counting’ are both slow instrumental songs and that’s the reason they score lower on energy than the rest of the songs. ‘i apologise if you feel somthing’ is not totally instrumental, but it is a slower song compared to the rest of the album. This song is also used as the intro to Bring Me The Horizon’s concert, which is not surprising because it sounds very mysterious.
Loudness is also an interessting feature to look into. The legend shows that Sempiternal scores the hightest and the three older albums score the lowest out of all 6 albums. This is a surprise because the first few albums are definately considered metal and I would think that those songs would score high on the loudness scale.
Are key changes more common in the past or present Bring Me The Horizon?
On the left two keygrams are shown for two different songs by Bring Me The Horizon. The first is a key visualization of the most popular song from amo ‘sugar honey ice & tea’ and the second one is the most popular song from Count your Blessings ‘Pray for Plagues’.
sugar honey ice & tea
Throughout the whole song, ‘sugar honey ice & tea’ has the same key. F minor, C minor, F major and C major are clearly the most present throughout the whole song. This means that BMTH didn’t add a modulation in their song. The song can be divided into 10 parts, regarding the key. In the first few seconds, a lot more keys are present. This exact moment is the intro to the song, which makes sense with the amount of keys present at that moment. After that the banding shows a verse, chorus, verse and a chorus with an extention before it. Then there is a change, the bridge. Most instruments are dropped and even the vocals for a few seconds. After that the song slowly builds up again, which can be seen in the keygram before 200 seconds. The chorus comes in again, with an outro where a lot of the instruments are dropped again.
Pray for Plagues
Looking at the keygram for ‘Pray for Plagues’, the keys used are even more clear than those in ‘sugar honey ice & tea’. Again C minor is clearly present in this song, but this time Gb major, B minor, F# minor and C# minor are added. Again, no modulation is added in this song and sections can be visualized. The intro includes less keys, just like the other song. When listening to this song, it sounds typically ‘heavy metal’ with multiple electric guitars and the rough vocals. The melodies in the song are pretty similar throughout the song or will repeat themselves multiple times. That is why the banding might be clearer than ‘suger honey ice & tea’. This song also includes a bridge, but it is earlier in the song. The melodies being used in the bridge are totally different than anything we heared before in the song. It is a guitar solo with no vocals at all. It is clearly a different thing than the rest of the song and that can also be seen in the keygram. The end of the song is just repeating what has been played before, with a few changes and an outro.
Comparison
When looking at these two keygrams, I don’t see much difference. Both have an intro and outro, they have a bridge with less instruments and have the same kind of build with verses and chorus. Also, neither modulate in the song and so stay within the same key throughout the song. The only big difference between the songs is the repeating of melodies. I feel like ‘Pray for Plagues’ uses less variations than ‘sugar honey ice & tea’ when looking at the melodies.
Do songs from the same album cluster together?
This picture shows the 69 Bring Me The Horizon songs from all 6 albums being clustered together. By looking at it we can devide the songs into four main clusters: 1) From ‘Memorial’ till ‘The Sadness Will Never End’ 2) From ‘wonderful life’ till ‘Sleep With One Eye Open’ 3) From ‘Don’t Go’ till ‘Liquor & Love Lost’ 4) From ‘ouch’ till ‘Run’
Here you can see a list with the cluster number and how many songs are in that cluster:
| Cluster | Number of songs |
|---|---|
| 1 | 12 |
| 2 | 19 |
| 3 | 17 |
| 4 | 21 |
First Cluster
In the first cluster the first three songs are actually the outliers that I talked about in the second page of this portfolio. These songs are a lot slower, softer and are instrumental (besides ‘i apologise if you feel something’, this one does include vocals). They have a totally different feel to them in comparison to the rest of the songs, which is why it makes sense that they don’t really belong in a clear cluster. Below you’ll see a table with the 6 albums and how many songs of that album are in this cluster.
| Album | Number of songs |
|---|---|
| Count your Blessings | 2 |
| Suicide Season | 5 |
| There is a Hell | 2 |
| Sempiternal | 2 |
| That’s the Spirit | 0 |
| amo | 2 |
Second Cluster
The table below shows that Sempiternal has the most songs in the second cluster. For Count your Blessings this section includes the majority of their songs as well. When looking at the numbers, this cluster doesn’t give an indication that songs from the same album cluster together. By listering to the songs I can understand why these are clusterd together. They have a clear electric guitar sond and have approximately the same tempo. Also, the vocals on these songs are very strong.
| Album | Number of songs |
|---|---|
| Count your Blessings | 5 |
| Suicide Season | 3 |
| There is a Hell | 2 |
| Sempiternal | 6 |
| That’s the Spirit | 0 |
| amo | 2 |
Third Cluster
When looking at the third cluster, There is a Hell Believe Me I’ve Seen It. There is a Heaven Let’s Keep it a Secret stands out with 8 songs out of 17 in this section. All the other albums except for That’s the Spirit also have a few songs in this section. Like the second cluster, by listening to the songs it becomes clear why these songs are clustered together. It used the same kind of guitar sounds as the last cluster, but the tempo is turned up a lot. As well as the second cluster, these songs are what people would generally call Heavy Metal.
| Album | Number of songs |
|---|---|
| Count your Blessings | 3 |
| Suicide Season | 2 |
| There is a Hell | 8 |
| Sempiternal | 2 |
| That’s the Spirit | 0 |
| amo | 2 |
Fourth Cluster
The fourth cluster is made up of songs from the last three albums (Sempiternal, That’s the Spirit and amo). All the songs from That’s the Spirit are in this 4th section and the majority of amo as well, but for Sempiternal this is not the section with the most songs in them. What brings these songs together in the clusters might be the vocals for a change. It feels like the songs is build around the vocals and therefore the vocals are more ‘important’ than the instrumental music. The vocals are less ‘heavy metal’ and some people might say that these songs are actually being sung instead of ‘screamed’.
| Album | Number of songs |
|---|---|
| Count your Blessings | 0 |
| Suicide Season | 0 |
| There is a Hell | 0 |
| Sempiternal | 3 |
| That’s the Spirit | 11 |
| amo | 7 |
Summary
In general, the most recent albums are clustered together in one section and the older albums are clustered in others. This is very interessting, because it shows that the newer albums are different than the older ones and in such a manner that they (in general) won’t cluster with eachother until the very end of the graph.
How do the clusters show for different features?
This headmap shows the same clustering as before, but this time with different features to compare with.
The features instrumental and acousticness are very interssting. In the middle it shows a very smooth line, while below and above it is not as smooth. These are actually the fourth cluster with the songs from the last 3 albums and the first few songs from the first cluster. Like I said before, the first few songs of the first cluster are instrumental and therefore score high on this feature. For the same songs a darker patch can be seen for loudness, c01 and enery and a lighter patch from instrumentalness till D#/Eb. Besides those songs, no big patches stand out. Everyting is pretty much scattered around, which tells me that there are no songs (besides the ones I talk about above) that stand out between all of the BMTH songs.
How do genres differ in their positivity and their intencity levels?
To start of the next section of this portfolio, let’s look at the distribution of genres on the energy/valence/loudness plot. In general, the genres score high on energy and average to low on valence.
Energy
Like I said, in general all the genres score high on energy. The ones that stand out are: Heavy Metal and Punk. Both of those, but especially Heavy Metal, score the highest (1.0 or just below). Another genre that scores high on energy is Rock, but also has a few songs that score a lot lower, below 0.5 even. It makes sense that these genres score high on this feature, because they usually have a fast tempo and use a lot of (real) instruments. The genre that scores the lowest is Indie, although it also has a large amount that scores between 0.5 and 0.8. Pop is actually in the middle of everything. It can be said that Pop has an average energy level compared to other genres.
Valence
For genres, the majority is gathered around the middle for this feature, but tend to score higher rather than lower. To my surprise, Rock scores the highest for valence, which means rock songs are very positive. Punk tends to stick around the middle and Heavy Metal scores a lot lower than the other genres. The other genres are spread out pretty evenly, from low to high.
Loudness
From the 5 genres, Punk is the loudest and Indie and Rock are the quietest. Again, Rock takes me by surprise. From my own experience I know Rock is usually a loud genre, but the songs in this playlist might not be.
Comparison to Bring Me The Horizon
When looking at this plot and the other one for the BMTH albums, things can be noticed. In general, the albums scored high on energy and low on valence. The same can be seen for the Heavy Metal genre, which mostly gathers in the left upper corner as well. I explained in the album plot that the three newest albums tend to score higher on valence than the older ones. When comparing that to this graph, Punk and Rock are the genres that score higher on this scale as well. This gives an indication that the newer albums might fit the genre Punk and/or Rock better.
Which genre has a track most in common?
The picture on the left is a mosaic of the the 5 different genres I’ve used in this corpus.
Continuing from the last page, a classififier can be a handy tool. Training a classifier to recognize different genres and showing what genre fits best to a song, can definately be used to answer my research question If, for example, a song from Count your Blessings is closest to Heavy Metal and a song from amo is closest to Pop, it will give a strong argument.
An structural analysis of ‘heavy metal’ and Heavy Metal based on pitch
The self-similarity matrices on the left are based on pitch/chroma. The left SSM is a song called ‘heavy metal’ from BMTH’s latest album amo. The SSM on the right is a song called ‘walk’ by Pantera. Pantera is an American groovemetalband who are known as trendsetters in their genre in the nineties. I chose this song to compare to ‘heavy metal’, because it is the most popular song from the Heavy Metal Spotify playlist. The reason I’ve chosen to compare these songs together is because the song is called heavy metal, but I want to know if it is actually a Heavy Metal song and therefore have similarities with ‘walk’.
First thing that is different about these two songs is the duration. ‘heavy metal’ is a lot shorter than ‘walk’. The both matrices have a clear checkerboard pattern and can both be split up into 4 sections. The transitions from one section to the other are more clear in ‘walk’ than in ‘heavy metal’. The other way around, ‘heavy metal’s’ bridge is more defined than the bridge from ‘walk’. ‘walk’ has the same guitar riff that keeps coming back after the verses. The bridge in ‘walk’ consist of a guitar solo, which playes on top of the melodies by the other instruments that have been playing throughout the rest of the song. This is not the case for ‘heavy metal’. Here the bridge consist of a beatbox solo with some electronic sounds. So, the reason that the bridge in ‘heavy metal’ is more clear in the SSM is because totally new material is being used. This is unlike ‘walk’, where the guitar solo is accompanimented by repeated material.